Everyone agreed that this was smart. Most people agreed that, even though he was stretching the truth, it was legitimate in the sense that politicians are always allowed to claim credit for good things that happen during their term, so long as they are aware that they will also then be stuck with blame for the bad. Some people vigorously disputed the political one-sidedness of the Bush administration claim, pointing out the long history of Democratic Party and labor-union involvement in the American diplomatic, military and human-rights struggle against the Soviet imperium; they didn’t feel his couple of vague, pro forma nods to postwar bipartisan efforts began to cover that subject.
Finally, a few people, primarily his conservative Republican critics, complained that from their point of view Bush had all along been weak and in need of prodding (from them) in the great enterprise: he had stayed cozy too long with Gorbachev, they said, seeming to prefer dealing with constituted Communist authority, as he did in China also, to encouraging the anti-Communist leaders; he had told the rebelling Lithuanians and the Ukrainians to cool it; he had had to be pressed into identifying more with Yeltsin (by Nixon, among others) and so forth. That from his friends on the right.
May I briefly interrupt this classic American political squabble over which of us has been responsible for some cataclysmic event overseas to mention an overlooked party in the proceedings, the people of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe themselves? Surely like many others, I cringed every time the president used those self-regarding formulations as to how the Communists were overthrown “Just pause for a moment to reflect on what we’ve done.” “We have a lot to be proud of-a lot.” “I saw the chance to rid our children’s dreams of the nuclear nightmare and I did.” Twice he bragged about how much he’d “helped” change the world; it was as close as he came even to implying that these others might have been involved. Even when he was allowing for some Democratic involvement, Bush was seeing the whole thing as an American undertaking: “Make no mistake, the demise of communism wasn’t a sure thing. It took the strong leadership of presidents from both parties. . .”
How about the strong leadership of Lech Walesa? I found myself asking. How about those brave, beleaguered human-rights dissidents, the defiant and persecuted independence movement in Lithuania, the vulnerable, unarmed crowds in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland who had first had the strength of mind to reject the drummed-in message of the tyranny over many decades and then the strength of will to risk all in deposing it? How about those waves of daring Russians, led by Yeltsin, who held their building and then, finally, their country against the coup makers?
Nobody would argue, least of all the people in those newly transformed countries, that the American role in the cold war from the late 1940s on was not central in keeping the possibility of their eventual freedom alive and in doing much-and much that was heroic-to promote it. And I think it is also true that an awful lot of the liberal left, though far from all of it, was, infuriatingly, just out to lunch on this essentially moral issue in more recent times. But the lion’s share of the glory of the last three years surely belonged not to Americans of any stripe or station, but rather to those valiant thousands who took to the streets in the East and their mortally endangered leaders-Havel, Walesa, Landsbergis, Yeltsin et al. They justly thrilled the world.
By what incredible oversight, then, could George Bush deliver a 58-minute acceptance speech that highlighted the liberation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and his own contribution to it) without once even briefly mentioning the anguish and suffering and bravery of these people whose handiwork it truly was?
My conclusion is that Bush, when he is in what he generally calls his campaign mode, becomes remorselessly and perhaps even uncharacteristically me-minded. (“Nothing hurts me more than to meet with soldiers home from the Persian Gulf who can’t find a job.” Hurts him? They are the ones who are getting the hurt. He is the one who is supposed to be doing something about it.) Bush seems to see all campaigns as illegitimate challenges to his personal right to have the office he is seeking. Whatever the ostensible issue, he makes it himself-the unfair way he is being treated, the degree to which he is misunderstood, the depth with which he cares, the pugnacity with which he intends to strike, don’t cry for him, do cry for him and so forth.
It is odd. His campaigns tend to be primarily about himself, and yet you feel it is not about his real self. For there is always something implausible, acquired-for-the-occasion about the persona Bush projects when he is running. His ham-and-cheese-sandwich folksiness, his pork-rind and “kicking a little ass” and “read my lips” tough-guy stuff never quite fit. Now, despite the profound differences in their nature and circumstances, he is telling us he is Harry Truman, more or less impersonating Truman in the presidential campaign of 1948. Bush always becomes someone else when he is running. The exasperating part for others is that you cannot imagine that the political construct that results-petulant, nasty, self-involved-can hold a candle to the actual guy who is portrayed by family and friends as being so different from that. The actual guy, I must believe, would have been incapable of leaving out of his speech all reference to the actual people whose triumph the liberation of Eastern Europe really was.
